Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘We have no detonators, what do you think you’re going to use as a charge?’ Snyder sneered.

  Krieg shrugged off the insolence and looked over at the Redemption Corps sniper who had saved his life.

  ‘Think you could hit a fuel tank with that thing?’

  VII

  Mortensen had never been inside a god before. It wasn’t at all like he’d imagined. For a thing that looked so impressively gargantuan on the outside, it was a testament to claustrophobia inside the thick armour plating. A perpendicular tour puzzle of crawlspaces, gantries, bulkheads and laddershafts, the Mortis Maximus had swallowed the Redemption Corps whole.

  Power was out the length of the Titan and the command deck had been dead and eerily empty. Snapping muzzle lamps to their hellguns, the storm-troopers descended, their swift but wary cover formation cutting patterns through the pitch darkness with the beams of their torches.

  The major had had Greco seal the command deck sky hatch he’d originally hacked in order to avoid any unwelcome visitors coming in from the rear and through Uncle’s ragged opening. He then had the troop split into three small groups under Conklin, Vedette and himself. While the master sergeant pushed on into the thorax network of modules and engineering vestibules below, Vedette and Mortensen took their sweeps in opposite directions, exploring the maintenance ducts and ordnance vaults above the mighty super-heavy weapons mounted on each colossal arm.

  Vedette’s team had drawn the Volcano Cannon protruding from the left arm of the massive Titan, meaning that her sweep consisted of a tour of the very heart of the god-machine: the dormant plasma reactor, that ordinarily powered not only the devastating Volcano cannon but the Titan’s very automotive functions.

  Mortensen on the other hand was landed with the nightmare of the gigantic gatling blaster. His men moved swiftly and silently through the darkness of room after room packed to the gills with mega bore bolt rounds, ready to fall upon instruction through the autoloader vents below and directly into the open breech of each titanic, revolving barrel.

  ‘Major,’ a voice came softly across the micro-bead. ‘Best get up here.’

  Mortensen worked his way up through a series of pokey, valve encrusted cubicles and padded along a narrow corridor. Trooper Teague had been leading the way but was currently waiting for him against a pressure hatch.

  The major had taken an instant liking to Teague. Elysians spent their lives in the air and so the young trooper was a natural drop-soldier, despite his tender years.

  The two men crouched in the companionway for a moment.

  ‘And…’ Mortensen prompted. Teague thought he could see it. He casually waved his hellgun in a wide arc in front of them. The lamp beam struggled with the black depths but revealed enough to prompt the major to add his own.

  It was incredible. Smack bang in front of them the claustrophobic confines of the god-machine gave way to a small oasis of open space. It wasn’t a conduit or chamber; it wasn’t even square. A perfect sphere of freedom had been cut out of the restrictions of the thoracic decks. Metal decking, support struts, cabling and instrumentation all ended in polite, clean lines around the open space. Teague ran a finger over one curved edge, seemingly cut from a bulkhead.

  ‘Smooth,’ Teague told the major. ‘Never seem anything like it. What kind of a tool can do that?’ Mortensen nodded with hesitation. The Elysian was right of course: even a plasma torch, which was what someone would need to do something like this, left rough edges. This also left the question of why anyone would want to create a spherical hole of emptiness in the middle of a Titan. Mortensen’s stomach tightened.

  The major’s micro-bead chirped. It was Conklin.

  ‘Crew located, boss.’

  That was something. ‘Where?’

  ‘Engineering – Thorax East, deck six, Void Shield Generator Room. Or at least that’s what it says on the blast doors,’ the sergeant came back.

  ‘Status?’

  ‘No idea. Something’s got ’em spooked because we’ve identified ourselves and they ain’t raising these doors for anything.’

  ‘Stand by. We’re coming down.’ Mortensen switched channels. ‘Vedette, you getting this?’

  ‘Receiving, major.’ As usual the Mordian officer was ever ready, monitoring the vox-traffic.

  ‘Time to regroup. How’s your sweep?’

  ‘You might want to take a look at the plasma reactors. Someone’s ripped the hell out of them.’

  Mortensen mulled it over: Vedette wasn’t given to exaggeration.

  ‘No time. Meet me downstairs.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ she returned without question.

  ‘Vedette,’ Mortensen cut in before she signed off. ‘Detonators or small arms?’ There was a pause.

  ‘By hand, sir.’

  The major turned slowly towards the black emptiness and shone his barrel lamp up at a maintenance opening about six metres above them on the other side.

  ‘Can you make that?’ he put to Teague. The storm-trooper took it as a friendly insult: Mortensen had asked him to scale, crawl down and hang off worse things than that before. The major nodded. ‘Push on and sweep the operational ordnance compartments. Anything out of the ordinary, I want to know about it. Otherwise, make your way down to ground level and the pick-up. Understood?’

  By way of a reply, the nimble Elysian snapped his hellgun to his pack and vaulted the first gap. Without fear he took a succession of near gymnastic steps before launching himself up into an exposed set of coolant lines.

  ‘Major,’ he called, hanging by one hand and turning slightly. ‘I’ll beat you down there.’

  Mortensen left the young soldier to his acrobatics and began his own descent.

  It didn’t take long for the major to reacquire his squad. As the bullet flew Conklin wasn’t far below them, despite taking a spinal column ladderwell directly into the Engineering sub-levels. The major met Conklin cradling his bolter by the secured blast doors.

  ‘How do you know they’re in there?’

  ‘Took a shot at us, didn’t they,’ Greco croaked from behind. He was sitting on a barrel of lubricant behind the open bulkhead. Minghella was with him, his back to the major and his head bobbing up and down as he went to work on a field dressing.

  ‘You took one?’ Mortensen asked.

  ‘In the foot.’ Uncle smirked, which was something he rarely did.

  ‘Laugh it up,’ Greco shot moodily, his usual good humour gone.

  ‘They secured the blast doors and locked them off,’ Quant continued, smiling. ‘Emperor knows where they’re getting the power. Engineers probably rigged something temporary.’

  Mortensen suppressed the involuntary curl of his own lips. ‘Will he pull through, sergeant?’ he put to Minghella sarcastically. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Good. TFC Greco, hobble that bony ass of yours over here and hack those blast doors.’

  Kicking off the barrel and sporting an exaggerated limp the storm-trooper made his way across, using the cool passage wall for support. He snatched his satchel of tools from an amused Uncle and trailed a ribbon of bandage where Minghella had not had time to secure the dressing. As Greco hacked into the hydraulic rune mechanism with his equipment he muttered guttural hive oaths to himself.

  ‘How many?’ Mortensen asked.

  ‘I saw the flash of five barrels, at least,’ Conklin informed him.

  The door mechanism made an unhealthy sounding clearance before juddering open. Greco shambled back before snatching up his weapon, as well he might. As the robust door rolled open the Redemption Corps were met with the glare of bioluminarc lamps and a thicket of las barrels – primed and pointed.

  After a dumbfounded second, storm-troopers’ barrels followed suit; accompanied by the flash of open palms from both sides. Some screaming and bawling ensued with Mortensen’s harsh roar coming out on top.

/>   ‘Get those vrekkin’ rifles on the ground!’

  A crate-chested chief engineer waved an improvised flamer in his face and a spindly tactical officer, his cranial lines and plugs gathered together in a ragged pony tail, slid the long barrel of a lasgun over the engineer’s shoulder. ‘We’re Redemption Corps, you slut-mongerers. This is asset recovery: someone wants you plugging in somewhere else, so unless you want to be walking out of here with a serious physical impediment – like death – you’ll lay your weapons on the deck.’

  A pistol came down and a woman in a black uniform and cap stepped forward, running her slender fingers along the trembling barrels and pushing them to the floor. She had rich, unsmiling lips and an eye-patch to match her dour uniform.

  ‘Princeps Hess,’ she enlightened him as her crew placed their weapons on the generator room floor. ‘The Mortis Maximus is mine.’

  ‘Not for much longer,’ Mortensen informed her with casual hive-world smarm. ‘My men are going to walk you out of here. A convoy of carriers will then take you out of the hotzone and you’ll be airlifted to safety. That’s the plan, but don’t quote me on it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ Mortensen wasn’t used to people refusing his offer of rescue. ‘You’re the second person today who was under the misapprehension that they can give me orders. I must be losing my powers of persuasion. But you see that’s why I’ve got this.’ He brought up his hellgun and shone the lamp into her remaining eye. ‘It speaks a variety of different languages but even that doesn’t matter because actions – I’m reliably informed – are louder than words.’ He primed the rifle savagely.

  ‘The god-machine has been infiltrated and somehow sabotaged from the inside. That’s why we are immobilised; that’s why we’re hiding in the generator room. This hallowed Titan cannot be left in the hands of the enemy.’

  ‘It can,’ Mortensen assured her, ‘and it will. That’s not within my mission parameters. Some idiot determined that your bony backsides were worth recovering and my men have in turn risked their own lives to achieve that end. We’re not here to save your damn machine, princeps. That’s someone else’s headache, thankfully. We came for you. So if you’d be so kind, my men can only hold a perimeter for so long.’

  ‘Our weapons…’

  ‘My men can handle your security. I don’t trust your trigger finger, anyways. You might be able to sunder worlds in this thing, but you shoot like cripples. You had a clean shot and the element of surprise and you pranged one of my men in the foot for Throne’s sake. Don’t worry though; he had it coming.’ Mortensen spun, looking for Conklin.

  ‘Sergeant, take the men and get the bridge crew and engineering staff here down to ground level as soon as possible. Double-time it. Be on your guard – we have unfriendlies in here.’ Mortensen cast a disparaging eye over Hess and her crew as they began filing out.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘Kynt: raise Deleval. Make sure that convoy is in position for our exit. Don’t take any crap from that Volscian piece of trash. If he gives you any trouble, tell him it’ll be my boot up his backside.’ The young comms-officer nodded his freckled face and went to work on his equipment.

  Mortensen started drifting towards the opposite exit.

  ‘What about you?’ Vedette put to him.

  ‘I think I know how the infiltrators got in. Teague’s up there.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ the Mordian insisted, heading for the companionway.

  ‘I sent him, I’ll get him,’ Mortensen growled, stopping her in her tracks. ‘You make sure the Titan crew get to the ground alive.’ The major streaked off in the opposite direction, leaving Vedette to protect the rear of the escort, his voice the only clear thing in the swirl of shadow. ‘That might be harder than you think.’

  It wasn’t difficult to find his way back up the autoloaders, but Mortensen made considerably harder work of negotiating the sphere of open emptiness beyond than Trooper Teague had.

  In Fire Control the major found signs of life, or more accurately: impending death. Scores of servitors, charged with the smooth operation and maintenance of the colossal gatling blaster, had been ripped from their stations and butchered. Heads littered the deck with the kind of sickly, flesh-drawn grins servitors were given to. Blood and the black arterial oil that ran through the drones’ bodies ran down the walls and pooled around the dismembered corpses.

  This didn’t feel like renegade Mechanicus menials. This was something else. Mortensen moved through the carnage with cautious urgency, swinging his hellgun around corners and up through vents and hatches.

  A ripple in the darkness. Mortensen came to terms with the reality that he wasn’t alone. The sting of vulnerability brought up the hairs on the back of his neck; the scrape of a footstep on the deck up ahead; the vanishing glint of an eye in his roving lamp. He was so preoccupied with these distractions that he almost missed Teague.

  With all the gore and butchery already on show in the murky fire control station, the young Elysian’s battered, blood-drenched body hardly seemed to merit a second glance. He was hanging in the chains of a block and tackle, his arms and head drooped through loops of an ammunition hoist. He’d been completely run through with some kind of wicked blade and his body was criss-crossed with deep gouges that were still leaking his lifeblood all over the mounds of ammunition below. He was dead though – that much was certain.

  Mortensen suddenly had the feeling that someone was walking over his grave; if his grave had been the deck floor directly behind him then he would have almost certainly been right. Gripping his rifle tightly in both hands he spun around, ready to unleash fully-automatic hell on his stalker. Whoever it was he was big, powerful and had reflexes the major hadn’t accounted for. A fist came smashing down on the barrel, sending the weapon clattering to the floor. The powerful foot stamped down into the rifle’s breech, impossibly crushing the converter underfoot, before scraping it backwards across the deck, tearing its power cable from Mortensen’s pack.

  The compartment descended into complete darkness as the weapon’s muzzle smacked into the wall and smashed the lamp. Something like a hand slipped around his neck from behind and enveloped his throat in a vice-like grip. Mortensen’s first instinct was to tear at the fingers with his own. His boots were off the ground now and the air in his lungs disappearing fast. The digits weren’t moving, however, kept there by an incredible force of will and bulging tendons. If Mortensen hadn’t been so preoccupied with the fading oxygen in his lungs, more of his panic-stricken thoughts might have been devoted to the strange, ribbed and leathery fingers grasping for him. It was probably some Mechanicus maniac in a pressure suit, the major reasoned, but he couldn’t help considering the possibility that Krieg was in fact correct and he was in the presence of some malformed, chaotic mob devoted to some unholy cult. As he relived the moments of the attack through his blurring consciousness he could swear that he’d seen multiple limbs and claws.

  His flailing boots had caught several limbs and bodies in the blackness and Mortensen suspected that he was surrounded. This was confirmed when some kind of blade slashed across his midriff, slicing through his carapace and into his stomach. He couldn’t feel the pain of course, just the ugly tugging of flesh as it gave and tore in a ragged gash. His hands instinctively clutched his belly and were almost immediately slippery with blood.

  His thumb brushed his belt and following it with his fingers he found his way to his holster and side arm. Snatching the autopistol in a fast-fading grip he brought the heavy pistol up, rested the top of the snub, quivering barrel on his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

  Something died behind him. Mortensen’s limp body tumbled to the floor. He couldn’t quite describe the inhuman screech his assailant had made, but he’d heard more death-cries than most people and he knew that they were all sickeningly individual. A fully-automatic blast of autofire in the face couldn’t be good news fo
r anyone.

  On his knees he bent over and kept pressure on the gaping wound across his stomach. In the dark it was impossible to tell how deep it was but he was pretty sure that his guts were still where they should be. With his forehead resting on the cold metal of the deck he could feel the tremor of heavy footfalls all around him and fearing another attack, let loose blindly with the remaining rounds in the pistol.

  The savage roar of the weapon seemed to drive them back; he might even have clipped one or two of them. He fumbled in the darkness for a second clip but the magazine slipped through his blood-sticky fingers and onto the floor. It was a horrible feeling. With the sensitivity of his skin reduced to a cool numbness he relied heavily on sight for dexterity. Long gone were the days he could strip down an autopistol blindfolded. In the darkness his eyes could tell him nothing and he couldn’t tell whether or not he was touching the magazine or the floor. He could hear at least and had to listen to heavy footfalls approach. The horde was back. In a rage of frustration Mortensen abandoned the clip and went for his last magazine. Slamming it home he scrambled messily across the floor, hand scrabbling around in his own gore.

  As gnarled and knotty appendages caressed the back of his armour he swung the autopistol behind him as both club and firearm, the short barrel sweeping the compartment, trailing the bright arc of a muzzle flash. It was a strange couple of seconds. It was a relief to have his fingers around something reassuringly unwieldy.

  In the momentary illumination provided by the hot gases escaping the autopistol’s barrel, Mortensen picked out the bulkhead by which he’d entered. The ghostly forms of his assailants were also fleetingly visible, moving with inhuman speed and receding with the shadows. The overwhelming impression, in the dull environment of the Titan interior, was one of colour: puce green flesh.

  There was the swiftest notion of filthy fangs and claws, and his stalkers’ bulbous bulk was decorated with corrugated flak and tattered robes. Greenskins. Greenskins on board the Titan. Greenskins here on Illium: just not like any greenskins Mortensen had seen before. Or half seen – Mortensen had only been privy to the barest glimmer in the lightless confines of the fire control station.